NASA is working on the development of the EmDrive and the Chinese Space Agency is already testing the EmDrive in orbit. this drive is based on sound and frequency as far as I understand it and would make liquid propulsion redundant - even the trip to mars would be reduced from more than 6 months to some weeks.
The basic ideas have always been generational ships, because speed is the biggest problem. We can definitely not travel as far as the current state of technology, but who knows what progress is still waiting in the future for us.
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I dont know what specs a EM Drive has, but there is a effect that we cannot trick yet: inertia. Even if you have a drive that is incredibly powerful, you can only accelerete at a certain rate or the ship selfdestructs. And this acceleration rate gets rediculously low if there are people on board.
1/10 LS is 29,979.245 metres per second, or 107,925,282 km/h. To get to that kind of speed will require many many years without destroying the ship in the process. And then, you have to slow down again from that speed early enough, because the same laws apply for that.
However, these laws are bound to gravitation and in space they are close to not there. They only occur when you are in a gravitational field of a planet. In addition, there are tests with plasma and electric fields to completely eliminate the phenomenon of gravitation. For that it was necessary to first find the predicted gravitational waves and to characterize them and that was done thanks to CERN. Such a field in the outer skin of a spaceship would also shield the very high radiation that is in space.
Unfortunatly its not. Inertia has nothing to do with gravitation. Where did you hear that? And if there is a way to neutralize it - who knows. On the Enterprise they can, with the Inertia dampeners. Just nobody knows how they work...
I think for interstellar travel, we need to think completely outside the box. The concept we are used to, to move physically through space from A to B, is not applicable for that. We need to manipulate the structure of space itself.
The discovery of gravitational waves may be a important piece of knowledge to go in that direction. I participated a little bit in that - a very little bit. By processing data from the LIGO peoject at home.
some time ago i read this things at science.com... but when you think that you know it better than the researchers, whch are working many years on this, ok :)
I think if Newton's laws have been declared invalid, I would have heard about it. :)